COUNTERCOLUMN: All Your Bias Are Belong to Us

"In the future, everyone will have access to VA health care for fifteen minutes."

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

The NY Times publishes... Peter Fucking SINGER!?!?!?!?!?

I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw the byline.

Here's something you should know about Peter Singer: He's an avowed eugenicist. Not only has he made the case for the elevation of animals to an equal moral plane with humans... he has, in the not-too-distant past, made a methodical and affirmative case for the murder of disabled infants.

But there is another case in which Singer supports infanticide that raises the blood pressure of his critics, one where he brings an impaired newborn into a cold calculation of pain and pleasure and concludes one life-form is exchangeable for another. "When the death of a disabled infant will lead to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy life, the total amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is killed ... killing a disabled infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Very often it is not wrong at all."

This is a man who also stated in an interview with Ronald Bailey, that if he were solely responsible for his own mother, a victim of alzheimer's, she might not continue to live.

From the Animal Liberation Front profile:

A recent article in The New Yorker shrewdly identified a key contradiction in Singer's approach to ethics. Confronting him with the fact that his own mother was dying of Alzheimer's disease, which rendered her, in Singer's scheme, a "nonperson," but that he had not euthanized her, Singer responded by saying it was "different" in the case of someone he knew and loved, and that he choose to care for her as long as possible, spending copious amounts on health care, albeit on someone doomed to die, rather than giving the money to aid those who could live. "I think this has made me see how the issues of someone with these kinds of problems are really very difficult." Betraying the abstract viewpoint that is an occupational hazard of the academic, Singer had no problem of prescribing euthanasia to imaginary others, but found it impossible to do in his own case with someone all-too concrete.

Really, though, this is the thinking at the heart of progressivism: utilitarianist arguments that dismiss the dignity and natural rights of the individual in favor of the collective.

It is one thing to be a liberal. One can be a liberal and still have respect for the dignity of the individual, the human being created in God's image. Progressivism is different. Its misguided utilitarianism gave rise to the whackier theories of Margaret Sanger, whose views are of a piece with the Nazis of the Third Reich, with the Stalinist collective farms and institutionalized collective child rearing, and with Peter Singer and Universal Health Care.

The masses do not think of UHC in those terms. But they are rubes. The intellectual progressives are fully aware that UHC will lead to eugenics and euthenasia at the margins.

What surprises me is that I haven't seen anyone make the connection between Singer and his earlier controversial views on infanticide. Perhaps, if he is associated with Obama and the libtard progressive UHC cause, he will deflate Obama's political capital in a hurry and cause UHC to take its rightful place in the dustbin of Congressional history.

"...killing a disabled infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Very often it is not wrong at all." Very often? Who gets to define when? If we allow ourselves indulgence in practical application of this thinking, could I not then determine that Peter Singer's "ethics" are more likely to cause more suffering for more people, and therefore he has, by proposing his theories, rendered himself less than a "person," and should be put out of our misery posthaste. Yeah, I could live with that. As to the view that it is "crude and inaccurate to smear Singer as a Nazi," if it sounds like a Nazi, goosesteps like a Nazi, and preens like a Nazi-it's a Nazi. The reason why the Nazis were so brash in presenting their theories is because they could be. They had no need to wrap themselves in intellectual gauze, or to speak softly. The Nazis of today have learned that their audience has adjusted its sensibility, and needs to coaxed along by its betters. This man is considered an expert on ethics?The world abounds in fools.Mark L.Lawrence, KS